Technical Field
The present application relates to the field of computer technology, specifically to the field of Internet technology, and more specifically to a virtual router cluster, and a data forwarding method and apparatus.
Description of the Related Art
With the explosive growth of the Internet, new services related to networks have attracted increasing attention. Cloud computing is one exemplary complex service. In a cloud computing network, user requirements become more diversified, for example, individual configuration of route configuration information, secure access control list (ACL), network address translation (NAT), network isolation, network rate limiting, and high-performance network transmission, which imposes higher requirements on routers and significantly increases the complexity of routers.
To address the new challenges in the cloud computing networks, currently there are two solutions for routers. One is based on software virtualization implementation, i.e., virtual routers. The other is highly customized physical routers (with specialized protocols, specialized hardware, etc.).
Prior art virtual routers generally implement routing by using iptables (network protocol address filtering system) and protocol stacks. In this implementation, repeated copying in a kernel is required during the packet processing, which results in a drawback in performance.
Logically, in a prior art virtual router cluster, one virtual router is generally responsible for merely forwarding multiple virtual router instances. When a virtual router is abnormal and unavailable, all the virtual router instances for which the virtual router is responsible are all in an unavailable state. In terms of extension, such an instance-specific hosting design (that is, there is a binding relationship between virtual router instances and virtual routers) of virtual routers lacks universality, and fails to achieve the independence of virtual routers.